150 Word Review: 'Quo Vadis' (1951)
Lyre, lyre, Rome's on fire
Postwar America was in the mood for big-budget morality tales about all-powerful empires and the persecution of faithful Christians. The 1951 Roman epic Quo Vadis was one of the first of Hollywood’s so-called “sword-and-sandal” flicks, named for all the swords and sandals. It’s not best in show — that’s a toss-up between 1958’s Ben-Hur or Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) — but Quo Vadis has everything I love about the genre, namely, costumes, giant sets, and casts of hundreds.
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, who has The Wizard of Oz on his resume, among other classics, Quo Vadis tells the story of a proud Roman general trapped between his love for Deborah Kerr’s Lygia, a Christian, and his loyalty to Nero, played with narcissistic gusto by Peter Ustinov, a mad emperor who loves feeding Christians to lions. This is peak Technicolor Spectacle™ and pure Jesus-y propaganda, a warning against hedonism and arrogance.
More Sword & Sandal: ‘Gladiator II’ (2024)
